A (2:49)

It's stuff and a lot of people are going to be learning it for the first time here. So.

B (2:54)

Right. It's okay. So it's, it's. So what we said is, you know, Scientific American. I, I'm not speaking for the magazine. I can say that at the outset. I'm. This is it, this is my view, this is the magazines. But, you know, the 1950s, we've been writing about nuclear proliferation. We actually got busted by the FBI in the 50s for supposedly violating nuclear secrets. So, you know, this is our thing. And the simple thing was we need to explain to people how do you make uranium into a bomb and why does, what does that mean for what we've just heard from the President and from the administration? And the answer is, you know, you dig this stuff up, you treat it with fluorine, you throw it into centrifuges. This is Manhattan Project level science. The Iranians are very good at it, or were very good at it until we bombed the hell out of their facilities in June last June last year. And you get out the U235 and they very deliberately, for the last, you know, since 2018, they're about enriched it to this 60% level, which is 60% U235, which is opposed to U238. The heavier farm of uranium is the stuff you need to, for a bomb. At about 90% enrichment, you can make a standard bomb. It's thought, it looks like, you know, 15 kilograms of that 90% enriched uranium. 235 is what you need to make a conventional nuclear bomb. So the Iranians didn't have that. They very deliberately stopped at this 60% level. They had these 440 kilograms of it. Israel and the US bombed their facilities and so they, they're out of the enrichment business where you need to get to 90%. This is according to the President, this is according to intelligence assessments and so forth. Okay, so they've stopped there now just before the before and after the war that we've just launched claims from the special envoy Witkoff, that they were very close to having 11 bombs. But okay, for that to have happened, they would have restarted the centrifuges that got bombed to hell and back. This is what the experts are saying, which they haven't done, according to the observers there, the IAEA and other folks, according to our own people According to dia, the Defense Intelligence Agency. So that's one roadblock. Once you do that, it's not enough. You're not like, you have a bunch of uranium. Oh boy, now we have a bomb, right? Even if you get the 90% to 15 kg of it, you have to machine that into these spheres of uranium metal. You have to make a working nuclear device. You have to make a bomb, you have to miniaturize it, to put it on a missile. If you're going to threaten the US with it, you have to develop a missile that will survive re entry with a and go off where you want it to go off. The National Threat Intelligence Assessment that came out recently said that Iran, if they decided to do that, now they haven't, it's going to be 2035 when they have that capability. So it's not imminent. So the whole thing, the notion that they were a few weeks away from being able to threaten the US with nukes, which is what we're really talking about here, just doesn't add up for people who do this for a living. You know, we talk to nuclear policy experts, former national labs people. The assessment from iaea, the other people have published, and it just is just as an ad explainer. Here's how you take uranium and make it into a top. We got to the end of it and it was like we weren't anywhere close to this. And I made it easy to slap that headline on the piece and saying like, it just, there's just no for this being the case. And, you know, the thing that's always hanging out there is this notion that there's some secret intelligence report that, you know, this is all wrong and they have some, you know, ability that, that only the, the Illuminati know about. But, you know, we all know that's nonsense. You know, if there was that, you know, finding, they would have leaked it because that's what they do. You know, in the Iraq war, they're in the UN showing photos of, you know, things that were classified. That's how they do it. They didn't do it. I mean, I used, I've been covering the story for that long too. And hell, when I was a kid, I worked at the Pentagon, you know, like, you know, before I was a reporter. That's just not how it works. You know, like there's, there's no real secrets, you know, there's things that are classified. Like, you know, exactly how do you go from one centrifuge to another when you're enriching These things, and that's properly classified. But like the idea that, you know, they would have this capability that the Israelis wouldn't be leaking like hell to hell and back if that was the case is, you know, nonsense. The Israelis, by the way, say that they have a very good notion of where this stuff is, the enriched uranium, the 440kg is located. And so we have a pretty good idea, you know, what's going on with that stuff right now. And. And all the indications are it wasn't about to be made into a bomb. So anyways, that might be longer than you wanted to hear, Scott, but that's maybe my summary.

A (8:02)

Yeah, no, that's great. All right. This episode of Scott Horton show, brought to you by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there. Enough already. Fool's errand. And then enough already. And provoked. And then of course, one might have fallen down there. But I got Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul. Scott Horton show interviews and Hotter than the Sun. You see that one back there over there? That way Hotter than the sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons. That's all interviews I did, all about nukes and really great stuff. And I busted my ass on these things and, you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They all been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one. I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that Provoked is the definitive account. In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. So maybe check that out. So there's so many points to go over there in terms of, you know, the actual engineering questions and all that. And then the politics, the war and all that. I mean, part of what we're talking about now in the media is, well, we think we know where they have their storage uranium. Whether it's still in gaseous form or whether it's already been, you know, converted back to metal or what. And that, yeah, they may have to send in some. Yeah, some incredible Hollywood movie worth of special operations team somehow in there with what parents or shoot bulldozers in and things. Massive land, you know, earth moving equipment to somehow dig up these canisters, some kind of thing. They've been proposing this. I don't. I don't know if they're really that crazy. They're talking a lot about trying to reopen hor moves and these other Things too. But you know, Trump said about two weeks before the war that, and I don't know the reality of this, it's hard to judge the reality of what the guy says, but it seems like he must have been referring to something. He said that, you know, they started digging and he may have been referring to Pickaxe Mountain there, which I believe is sort of adjacent to the Isfahan facility. And, and he's saying they started to dig to try to create a new facility somewhere. But I called them and I said, and I don't, I don't know, I, I'm pretty sure he said it first person like that, but I think the implication was he had Marco call or something. Right. And I told them, don't you do it. I, I see what you're doing with my satellites here and I'll bomb you. Don't even try it. And then he said they quit. They quit trying because he called them out and said, I can see what you're doing, so don't do it. So, and that was even just a couple of weeks before the war. So in his own words, he was saying whatever they were doing, he was acknowledging the reality, as you said, that as he stated last June, that he did obliterate their nuclear program. The DIA really kind of played that down. But he took Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan completely offline, which was taking Iran down nine pegs on a ten stair ladder. Right.

B (11:06)

And, and that they hadn't restarted their enrichment is things officials in the Trump administration had, had said at different times. I mean, what you're talking about is it makes it very confusing to report, like, because they say all kinds of things. You know, one day they're, they're, one day they're about to have 11 bombs and the next day, no, no, we obliterated them. And they haven't restarted their enrichment. A different person says different things. It's kind of wild, you know, having covered this because usually administrations are very sensitive about talking of anything having to do with nukes and they make sure they're singing all off the same page. And you know, while you can't believe what they, you can at least go off of that thing that they say is their position. But like, this is an administration that, like, who knows what Tulsi Gabbard saying today and who knows what Will Cough is saying today and who knows what Trump and Rubio is saying. They're all kind of at odds with each other. It makes it really hard for the experts, you know, that we talk to to say exactly what the US Positioned. Even so, it's, you know, that's why we're kind of like, well, the physics doesn't change. This is how nuclear fission takes place. And so let's just start there. And if you just work with that kind of timeline and, or you work with the science of intercontinental ballistic missiles, it takes, it took the North Koreans with all the will in the world three years more to come up with what they've done. Like, that's just how it works, folks. You know, that's, that's just chemistry and physics, you know, so that's where we're at.

A (12:29)

So now to rewind on the history of the thing. As you explained, you know, what they do have and don't and all of that. I believe it's agreed, or at least the dissenters don't bring this up because they've got nothing to say about it. So it remains mostly unspoken, but it's agreed by all the experts who are shooting straight about this that they have no plutonium route to a bomb whatsoever. Right. Because they poured concrete into their Iraq heavy water reactor back in 2015. And then the Buer reactor is a light water reactor, so the plutonium that it produces is too polluted with other isotopes and things to be used. And plus they don't have a reprocessing facility for any of that waste. It just goes to Russia and the Russians keep it under, at least under the old deal.

B (13:10)

So. Right.

A (13:11)

That part and forget. Correct. Like nobody's even saying as far as

B (13:17)

seen, nobody is talking about a plutonium route. We're talking uranium here. There's that other factor of the research reactor that's enriched uranium to some extent. That also seemed to have played a role in Trump's thinking. So it's, but it's not clear what he's talking about. If when he's talking about that research reactor which has 20% enriched uranium in it, versus this larger stockpile of 60% enriched uranium, that's just thought, as you say, to be buried under Isfahan and

A (13:47)

may still be in gaseous form. And then they already lost their conversion facility there for their ability to turn it back into a metal. So it's basically frozen at this point anyway. Right.

B (13:58)

It might be in the safest place. It could be buried there. You know, when you mentioned this commando radiant, I mean, one mayor is like, what if it doesn't work? And we've, you know, unearthed this stuff and then some militia runs off with some of it, you know, runs off with a Beer keg full of this stuff. And then all of a sudden we have a dirty bomb fe that we've created by, you know, trying to somehow do Operation Market Garden in the middle of Iran, which everybody I talked to say would be mission impossible. Just it. The example we pointed to in our story was Operation Sapphire in Kazakhstan. Even with the best will in the world, the Kazakhs helping us to remove about 600 kg, I think it was of nuclear, it was Russian nuclear sub fuel. Even with the best will in the world, it still took a month, you know, for to get this stuff out of there. You know, a month of having drones and people shooting, firing cannons at, onto a work site with, you know, how do you, you airdrop a bulldoze in there? How many. You know, this isn't a GI Joe episode, you know, this is, this just what you're talking about is very dangerous according to the people who do this sort of thing, who've spoken to us. So, and you know, it's, it's, it sounds like an episode of fallout. We're going to go into this buried mine and find these canisters, these beer kegs full of corrosive gas that's radioactive and might cause a criticality accident if we screw up and put them next to each other too close. I mean, that's, that itself is kind of wild. But things have happened and this is radioactive material, you know, like, what are you talking about?

A (15:40)

All right, so now on the 60%, you get a lot of this from the war party. They'd say things like, oh, yeah, well, what do you need 60% for? Or even one of my favorites was, I think it was Rubio, the Secretary of State, who said, well, the only countries that have 60% enriched uranium have nuclear weapons. Which is sort of a weird way to construct a sentence. And so, I mean, I, I don't want to spoil, like sit here and pretend and play dumb and ask you questions I already know the answer to. They started doing this as a bargaining chip after the Israelis assassinated their chief scientist in 2020 and then sabotaged the Natanz electricity facility in 2021. And they were only enriching up to 60% as a bargaining chip to trade away. However, critics have pointed out that technically it is theoretically possible to make a uranium gun type nuke with 60% uranium if you had a big enough thing. But then at that point, now you're talking about you'd need an airliner to deliver it to Israel.

B (16:46)

You have to deliver if some covert means and. Yeah, or as you say fly it on a 747. Yeah. They can blow it up in their

A (16:55)

own desert as a demonstration. Right. But not really do anything with it.

B (16:59)

They're signaling devices for force projection. So, you know, the notion that they would detonate one and invite a nuclear reply from the US Or Israel, you know, in terms of mutual assured, you know, destruction kind of theory is problematic. You build these things like the North Koreans did, to signal back off and give you space for your own military operations and your own sphere of influence. And the Iranians hadn't decided to do that. And it was quite deliberate, as you say, that according to the people who observe this sort of nuclear policy thing. They tell us that they were doing this as a bargaining chip, as a thing to have. And there's still discussions in the news today about them discussing this. Trump is demanding in his 15 point war discussion that we get their enriched uranium, which of course is great, but it's not like the knowledge of how to enrich uranium goes away. I mean, even if they give us every ounce of it, it's, they still know how to do it. They still know how to build centrifuges. It's, it's nuclear chemistry that's been known since 1945.

A (18:05)

Hey, guys, Scott here. You know, you've probably noticed when I'm interviewing somebody or somebody's interviewing me that I've got this great bust of Dr. Ron Paul in the background on my bookshelf here. Well, you can get one like that too. They're available again from the great artist Rick Casale. Just go to my website, Scott, Horton.org and look in the right hand margin. Click the link through there and use promo code Horton. You'll save 25 bucks and get free shipping at least in the lower 48 states. And he does custom work as well. So, I mean, it seems like really the only question here is political. Right. It's not about the technology or about, you know, any mystery of anything unknown by inspectors or anything like that is just where does the current president decide to draw the red line? Where W. Bush and Obama and sort of previous Trump. I don't know. Maybe not. But certainly W. Bush and Obama essentially accepted Iranian uranium enrichment. Just keep it below weapons. Great. And Obama and, and W. Bush have both vowed that they would start a war if the Iranians did break out toward a nuke. But it was just that they didn't. And that was the standoff was if you make a nuke, we'll attack you. And then they said, well, don't Attack us, We won't make a nuke. But then Trump called their bluff, but in doing so, he also severely crippled their program. So now they're way more likely to make one. They killed the ayatollah that said that. God said that you're not allowed to. And yet their actual capacity to manufacture a nuclear weapon has been severely degraded. I don't know if they're even bothering attacking their nuclear facilities now because they just already have. And all that's left is this light water reactor and you know, again, the, the medical research reactor in Tehran that are both harmless as far any weapons capabilities concern.

B (19:55)

So which they're certain that they could damage the material and then spread, you know, radiologic material across the landscape, which they don't want to. Nobody wants to do that.

A (20:05)

Yeah, maybe in Tel Aviv they do

B (20:09)

this. I don't know, as you say, though, that it's a political question, but that's how it is with nukes. The science feeds into it. You know, we've been through this movie, right? The Iraq War, right. You know, the, the, the threat was, oh, the next thing we're gonna see is, is a mushroom cloud. And I mean, it's sort of a weird, I don't know, it rhymes at least, you know, it echoes with that kind of argument. And so you have to know the science to ground truth, the political arguments, because there's a lot of people who don't know what the hell they're talking about here, who have political power and are saying ridiculous things to the public. And so if you don't start with that sort of as your ground truth for like how this works, then I think you're, you're condemned to not under. Follow the political argument. That's at least our case for writing about this. So.

A (20:58)

Sure, yeah. I mean, aside from the personal and professional frustration of telling the truth about this for 20 years and then that not mattering at all, and the war starting just on the most kind of preposterous sort of grab bag of half excuses, like the, the sort of barest parody of 2003. Really, when you look at the amount of effort put into even telling these lies, although it's very frustrating, I mean, at least they do have a nuclear program of some kind, whereas they knew Saddam had absolutely nothing like that going on at all.

B (21:35)

Still,

A (21:38)

it's very frustrating. The point is, as you're saying, like the, the, when the policy is based on foundation for defensive democracy talking points and not the truth, then they're going to be doing the wrong thing. Right there. If they don't even know what the actual stakes are, if they refuse, I mean, in other words, it'd be nice to think that the politicians go okay, here's, here's what we know, but here's what we're going to tell them. But when the politicians have really just only kind of the propaganda for their own frame of understanding the thing, then we're all in deep trouble. I think Dan, it's, it's a real

B (22:15)

concern where they drink their own Kool Aid, you know. And if what they're seeing is a talking head on the cable channel saying something ridiculous and that motivates actions, I mean it's gotten people killed, you know, and you know, we bombed a girls school based on our intelligence, you know, how, how much confidence can we feel in that, you know, and, and, and I said in the news, as you say, it's really frustrating. I mean the only news team that really got a rock right was like the Knight Ridder team right back in 2002. And what was their reward? They got bought out and they all got set on the streets, you know. And the guys who are still pushing this stuff, you know, on all sides are like still in business, you know. So it's really not to complain too much. You know, it's a. But it is frustrating to see a lot of discussion be polluted by sort of a non technical fairy tales of like how this all works. Yeah.

A (23:11)

And no importantly, just as you say, retailed by the very same people who are never held accountable for doing this before.

B (23:18)

Right.

A (23:19)

So like I gotta suffer Eli Lake retweeting Michael Rubin talking about why this is so necessary when you know this is the guy from the New York sun and the guy from the Office of Special Plans who outlay us into war last time.

B (23:32)

Both of them. Yeah. Well, I mean that's why it's important that I think that you're making this case because I hope, I hate to put more weight on your shoulder, but you are the mainstream media now. Shows like yours, like the newsrooms that I worked in when I was at USA Today's are science reporter. That's all gone. You know, there's not, there's not very many technically informed science reporters who can publish in what is we call, I guess the legacy media now. I guess I'm legacy media. And so it's outlets like yours actually that are. People are getting their news from. So it's important that there's people. You are like I say you are the mainstream media. Like we're we're not. And so it's important that people hear from, you know, outlets like this one, like how this all works. So, anyways, hats off to you.

A (24:13)

So, yeah, well, thanks and, and thanks for your time on the show to, to help us with this. Are you willing, like, if there are other podcasters watching who want to talk to you and, and have your expert understanding explained to their audiences as well, would you be willing to do that?

B (24:30)

Of course. I, like I say, I'm not speaking for Scientific American or its publisher. This is just me, an old reporter guy, an old science reporter who covers nukes talking. And I'm not a, I'm not a political person. You know, I'm, I. You should be. I should be upfront with you that I'm, I'm just, I have the para. Ideology of the news business, which is people should get the news, but if people can live with that, I'm happy to talk to anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (24:56)

That's great. And so, yeah, partisanship really shouldn't have anything to do with it when it comes to just what the facts are. Again, at Scientific American, Iran was nowhere close to a nuclear bomb, experts say by Dan Vergano. I hope I'm saying that right, Dan.

B (25:13)

Close enough, man. In Italy, they think I, you know, they're ashamed of me no matter what.

A (25:16)

But. All right, well, thank you. I really appreciate it.

B (25:21)

All right, good talking to you. Take care.

A (25:24)

The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's Errand. Enough already. And my latest, Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above@scott Horton.org and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at Scott Hortonshow.com and Patreon.com Scott Hortonshow Bumpers by Josh Length of music, intro and outro videos by Dissident Media Audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See y' all next time.

B (26:09)

Long drive ahead.

A (26:10)

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